The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Matthew Arnold’s theory.

We find ourselves here once more in the presence of Mr. Matthew Arnold. In his judgment, the modern world has been made what it is by the influence of two peoples, the Greeks and the Jews, representing respectively two distinct and almost opposed ideas, which are contending with each other for the possession of the modern mind. For Greece—the brilliant, but in spite of its subtlety of spirit, somewhat superficial Greece—art and science fill the measure of life. For the Hebrews life might be summed up in one word, justice. And by justice must not be understood a rigid respect for the rights of others, but a willingness to renounce one’s own interest, one’s own pleasure, a self-effacement in the presence of the eternal law of sacrifice personified in Javeh. Greece and Judea are dead; Greece faithful to the last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency of art and science, Judea faithless at the last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency of justice, and falling by reason of that very infidelity. Mr. Matthew Arnold finds the two nations symbolized in an Old Testament story. It was before the birth of Isaac, the veritable inheritor of the divine promise, who was humble but elect. Abraham looked upon his first son Ishmael, who was young, vigorous, brilliant, and daring, and implored God: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” But it could not be. Greece, the Ishmael among nations, has perished. Later the Renaissance appeared as its successor; the Renaissance was full of vitality, of future; the dream, the sombre nightmare had passed away, there was to be no more religious asceticism, we were to return to nature. The Renaissance held in horror the tonsured and hooded Dark Ages, whose spirit was renouncement and mortification. For the Renaissance itself the ideal was fulness of life, growth of the individual, the free and joyous satisfaction of all our instincts, of art and science; Rabelais was the personification of it. Alas! the Renaissance fell, as Greece fell, and the natural successor of the Renaissance, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s judgment, is George Fox, the first Quaker, the open contemner of arts and sciences. Finally, in our days, a people in Europe has taken up the succession; the modern Greece, dear to the enlightenment of all nations, the friend of art and science, is France. How often, and with what ardour, has this prayer in its favour been raised to God in heaven: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” France is the average sensual man, and Paris is his city, and who of us does not feel himself attracted? The French possess this element of superiority over the Renaissance, that they are more balanced than other peoples, and though France has aimed to liberate mankind and to enfranchise them from the austere rule of sacrifice, she has not conceived man as a monster, nor liberty as a species of madness. Her ideas are formulated in a system of education which lies in the regular, complete, and harmonious development of all the faculties. Accordingly the French ideal does not shock other nations, it seduces them; France is for them the land of tact, of measure, of good sense, of logic. We aim in perfect confidence at developing the whole human being without violence to any part of it. It is in this ideal that we have found our famous gospel of the rights of man. The rights of man consist simply in a systematization of Greek and French ideas, in a consecration of the supremacy of self, as against abnegation and religious sacrifice. In France, Mr. Matthew Arnold says, the desires of the flesh, and current ideas, are mistaken for the rights of man. While we are pursuing one ideal, other peoples, more tightly chained to Hebraism, continue to cultivate that justice which is founded on renouncement. From time to time they look with envy out of their own austere and dull life, and with admiration upon the French ideal which is so positive, so clear, so satisfying; they are half inclined at times to make a trial of it. France has exerted a charm on the entire world. Everyone at some period or other of his life has thirsted for the French ideal, has desired to make a trial of it. The French wear the guise of the people to whom has been intrusted the beautiful, the charming ideal of the future, and other nations cry: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” And Ishmael seems to grow more and more brilliant each day, seems certain of success, is on the point of making the conquest of the world. But at this moment a disaster occurs, the Crisis, the Biblical judgment arrives at the moment of triumph; behold the judgment of the world! The world, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s opinion, was judged in 1870: the Prussians were Javeh’s substitute. And once more Ishmael, the spirit of Greece, the spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of France, free-thought, and free conduct were conquered by Israel, by the spirit of the Bible, by the spirit of the Middle Ages. A brilliant but superficial civilization was crushed beneath the weight of the barbarous and unyielding asceticism of a more or less naïve faith. Javeh is even in the present century the god of battles, and woe to the individuals who do not believe, with the ancient Jew, that abnegation constitutes three-fourths of life, and that art and science together barely fill the other fourth.

Victorious superiority of Hellenism.

Rightly to estimate this philosophy of history let us occupy Matthew Arnold’s point of view, which is not without some shade of truth. Assuredly Greece and Judea, although their ideas dissolved into and became a part of Christianity, are, so to speak, two antithetical nations representing respectively two opposed conceptions of life and of the world. These two nations have unceasingly struggled against each other in intellectual battle, and one may accept as most honourable for France the rôle that Mr. Arnold has assigned to her, that of being the modern Greece, of representing the struggle of art and science against mystical and ascetic faith. Greece and France were conquered, it is true, but it does not follow from that fact that the spirit of Greece and France, of art and science, has been conquered by faith. The battle is on the definitive issue still uncertain. If one must trust to a calculation of probabilities, all the probabilities are in favour of science; if the French were conquered in 1870, it was not by German religion but by German science. In general it is very difficult to say that a doctrine is inferior because the people who maintained it have been vanquished in history. History is a succession of events whose causes are so complex that we never can affirm that we know absolutely all of the reasons which produced any given historical fact. There are, moreover, in the life of any people a number of currents of thought running side by side, and sometimes in opposite directions. The land of Rabelais is also that of Calvin. More than that, in other nations we see a species of official doctrine professed by a series of remarkable thinkers, which seems more or less in opposition to the more unconscious doctrine of the people, in which the conduct and thoughts of the great multitude may be regarded as summarized. What, for example, is to be considered as the true doctrine of the Jewish people? Is it the passionate faith of Moses, of Elijah, or of Isaiah; is it the scepticism of the Ecclesiast, already foreshadowed in the book of Job; is it the explosion of sensuality in the Song of Songs? It is difficult to decide; it may be affirmed with some show of truth that the temperament of the Jewish people as a whole is rather more sensual than mystic. The official doctrine handed down to us in the Bible may be regarded as a reaction against popular tendencies; a reaction whose violence is the measure of the strength and stubbornness of the tendencies against which it was directed. The great days of the Hebrew people were rather those when, under the reign of Solomon, the arts of ease and life were flourishing than those when the prophets were bewailing the disappearance of so much splendour. Or what was really the spirit of the people in the Middle Ages? Is it to be found in the mystical books of the monks of the times? And are the Middle Ages, apart from the Renaissance, to be regarded as constituting a great and completed epoch? Even if we supposed, with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that every brilliant age, such as the Renaissance, every age of art and science, harbours in its own bosom the germs of death, does that fact constitute a reason for lowering one’s estimate of such epochs of intense life, and is it not better for a people to have lived, even though but for a few years, than to have slept through centuries?

Analogy between life of nation and that of individual.

Nothing is eternal. When a nation has enjoyed a brilliant life during a certain number of years or centuries, when it has produced great artists or great scholars, there necessarily comes a period of comparative exhaustion. Religions also are subject to the law of birth, maturity, and decay. Where does the responsibility lie? On the very laws of life, which do not permit plants to blossom eternally, and which in general provide, in all the kingdoms of the natural world, that there shall be nothing so fragile as a flower. But if all human things are transitory, to labour for the efflorescence of intelligence, to regard art and science as the supreme aim of life, is precisely to pursue that which is least perishable. Art, science, the last achievements of the human mind do not decay; man alone, the individual disappears, and the ancient adage is eternally true: “Art is long, and life is short.” As to true justice, it also is surely eternal; but if by true justice be understood the hard law of Jehovah, the worship of this law has always fallen upon the insignificant epochs of history, and precisely upon the epochs of injustice and barbarism. Therein lies the explanation of the fact that that cult has flourished at periods when nations were the most robust and difficult to subdue. The manners of such nations are ferocious, their life at bottom is quite contrary to the ideal of justice, and their religious faith resembles their manners, and is violent and savage, and inclines them to intolerance, to fanaticism, to massacre; but all these elements of injustice none the less constitute, in the people that unites them all, so many additional chances of victory over other people. Later, when manners become more civilized, when faith diminishes and art and science are born, a nation often becomes weaker, directly as it becomes nobler; the finer an organism is, the more delicate it becomes, the easier it is to break. Renouncement of self, submission of the weak to the strong, and of the strongest to an all-powerful priest, the species of hierarchy that obtained in Judea, in India, and Europe during the Middle Ages, formerly gave a people a superiority in the struggle for existence, like that of a rock over a vegetable, of an oak over a sensitive plant, of a bull or an elephant over man; but is precisely that kind of effectiveness the ideal of humanity, and the aim to be proposed to human effort? To raise art and science to their highest possible development exacts a considerable expense of force; art and science fatigue and exhaust the people who give them birth. After epochs of effervescence, follow epochs of repose and of recuperation, epochs, so to speak, of intellectual lying fallow. These alternations of repose and productivity, of sterility and fecundity will continue to recur until some means be found of maintaining the human mind continuously in its state of highest vitality, as one fertilizes the earth, and, so to speak, thus secures a constant flow of sap and a perpetual efflorescence. The day perhaps will come when the psychic analogue of the rotation of crops may be discovered. However that may be, the greatness of a people has in the past too often exhausted it. But it does not follow, from that fact, that history must be read backward, and that periods of mere preparation and barbarism and despotism must be regarded as those which are the incarnation of the law of justice and have saved the race of mankind.

Hellenism contains the cure of its own evils.

If greatness kills it is beautiful to die for greatness; but when it is the death of a nation that is in question, mortality is never complete. Which is the more completely alive to-day, whatever Mr. Matthew Arnold may say, Greece or Judea? Which will be more alive to-morrow, France, which to-day seems trampled underfoot, or the nations which seem to be France’s superiors? If we were perfectly sure that France, better than any other nation, represents art and science, we might affirm with perfect certitude that she will possess the future, and say with confidence that Ishmael will live. It is true that, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s opinion, Ishmael represents not only the man of intellect but the man of the senses, of the desires of the flesh. Of a truth it is strange to see anyone regarding the conquerors of France as Quakers, and Paris can lay no better claim than London or Berlin to being dubbed the modern Babylon. Mr. Matthew Arnold’s mystic terrors in this connection are really deserving of raillery. What is just in his position is that the French, even in the pursuit of pleasure, display a certain moderation and measure, display a degree of art that is unknown to other people; and by that very fact they achieve, if not the substance, at least the form of morality, which is, as Aristotle has said, a just mean between two vicious extremes. In Mr. Matthew Arnold’s judgment, however, this specious morality serves simply as a cloak for the lowest degree of immorality, that namely of seeking one’s rule of life not in God but in human nature, with all its diverse tendencies, high and low. This immorality constitutes in its turn a sort of social danger, that of a softening or enfeeblement of the national character of a people. This danger appears to us illusory, or rather, if one may so speak, it is a question which belongs rather to hygiene than to morals; what is really wanted is that science itself should discover in the matter a rule of conduct. In reality, genuine men of science actually are those who know best how to direct themselves in life, and a whole people of men of science could leave little to desire on the score of conduct; and that fact shows that science itself contains an element of practical wisdom and morality. Note also that there exists an antagonism between cerebral labour and the violence of the physical appetites. The prohibitions which are based upon a mystical law too often season desire simply, as it is easy to prove by examples drawn from the clergy of the Middle Ages. A much more certain method may be employed, namely, to extinguish desire, to substitute a sort of intellectual disdain in place of religious terror. The Mohammedan religion prohibits the use of wine; but it is very easy to distinguish between wine and alcohol, which Mohammed did not formerly forbid for the sufficient reason that he was unacquainted with its existence. Moreover, religious faith is not only subject to subtleties of interpretation, it is subject to periods of weakness; but if, on the contrary, you issue no mystical prohibition but cultivate a man to a certain degree of intellectual development, he will simply not desire to drink; education will have transformed him more perfectly than religion could have done. Far from diminishing the value that individuals set upon pleasure, religions in reality frequently augment it considerably, because, over and against such and such a pleasure, and, as it were, holding the balance level against it, they establish an eternity of pain. When a religious devotee yields to temptation, he conceives the desired indulgence as, in some sort, of an infinite value, as condensing into an instant such an eternity of joy as may compensate an eternity of suffering. This conception, which unconsciously dominates the entire conduct of the believer, is fundamentally immoral. Fear of chastisement, as psychologists have frequently remarked, lends a certain additional charm to the forbidden pleasure; magnify the chastisement, you heighten the charm. Therein lies the explanation of the fact that, if a devotee is immoral at all, he is infinitely more so than a sceptic; he will indulge in monstrous refinements in his pleasures, analogous to the monstrous refinements in which his god indulges, in the item of punishments; and his virtue, consisting largely in fear, is itself fundamentally immoral. In epochs of scientific development this mystical and diabolical heightening of pleasure will disappear. The man of science is acquainted with the causes of pleasure, they fall into place in his scheme of things, in the general network of causes and effects; a pleasure is a desirable effect, but only in so far as it does not exclude such and such another equally desirable effect. The pleasures of the senses take their legitimate rank in the classified and subordinated list of human aims. A man of large intelligence holds desire in check by means of its natural and sole all-powerful antagonist—disdain.

Hellenism more just than justice.

To sum it all up, Ishmael is quite capable of regulating his own conduct without Jehovah’s help. Justice is salvation, said the Hebrew people; but science also is salvation, and justice too, and justice not infrequently more just and more certain than any other kind. If Ishmael sometimes strays into the desert, sometimes loses his way and falls, he knows how to get up again; he has strength enough in his own heart to help himself, and to make him independent of Jehovah, who left him alone in infinite space without even sending to his aid the angel mentioned in the Bible. If France has really, as Mr. Arnold says, formulated the new gospel of Ishmael, this profoundly human gospel is indubitably destined to outlive the other, for there is often nothing more provisional, more unlasting, more fragile, than what men have crowned with the adjective divine. The surest method of finding what is really eternal is to look for the best and most universal elements in the human character. But the gospel of the rights of man, Mr. Arnold objects, is the ideal of the average, sensual man only. One wonders what the meaning of the word “sensual” in this place can be, and what sensuality can have to do with an unwillingness to disregard the rights of other people or to have one’s own rights disregarded by other people. As if the rights of man had anything to do with sensuality! Mr. Arnold forgets that the word “right” always implies some measure of sacrifice. But the sacrifice is precisely proportionate—it is not the sacrifice of all for the benefit of one or of the few; it is not a sterile sacrifice, it is not a vain expense of force, it is the partial sacrifice of all for the benefit of all, it is the renunciation in our own conduct of everything which might interfere with like conduct on the part of other people; so that, instead of being a waste of social power, it is in the best sense an organization and an increase of social power. The people who first truly realize the gospel of the rights of man will not only be the most brilliant, the most enviable, the happiest of peoples, but also the justest of peoples, with a justice which will be not only national and passing, but, so to speak, universal and indestructible; not even the hand of Jehovah will be able to shiver its power, for what is really divine in power will dwell in its own heart. The French Revolution was not so purely sensual and earthly as Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms. It was an uprising not in the name of the senses but of the reason. The Declaration of Rights is a series of formulæ a priori, constituting a sort of metaphysics or religion of civil government, founded upon a revelation by the human conscience. It is easily comprehensible that positive and empirical thinkers, such as Bentham and John Stuart Mill and Taine, should have a word of blame for this novel species of religious Utopia; but a person like Mr. Matthew Arnold, who prides himself on being religious, ought not to draw back from it, ought even to admire it. Theodore Parker, a Christian not less liberal than Mr. Matthew Arnold, did so. Writing on the subject of the French Revolution, Theodore Parker said: that the French were more transcendental than the Americans. To the intellectual conception of liberty and to the moral conception of equality they joined the religious conception of fraternity, and thus supplied politics as well as legislation with a divine foundation as incontestable as the truths of mathematics. They declare that rights and duties precede and dominate human law. America says: “The Constitution of the United States is above the President; the Supreme Court is above Congress.” France says: “The constitution of the universe is above the Constitution of France!” That is what forty millions of men declare. It is the greatest proclamation that a nation has ever made in history.